I’ll get to a Part 2 for Angel Moxie, but I’m already about halfway through the archives for the next comic on my list, which is technically a five-comic multiverse, two comics of which are currently running, and one comic of which is mostly behind a pay barrier.

So this is about the remaining two comics: Roomies! and It’s Walky! Links are to the first pages of the respective comics. David Willis first started developing the universe that these stories take place in, as I understand it, when he was eight years old. Roomies! was a comic about college life that he drew for his college newspaper, and then he slowly started adding elements of older stories he’d thought up and taking things in a more sci-fi direction, until after three years the pretense was removed entirely and Willis simply changed the title of the comic.

I was going to start summarizing some of the more important plot elements of the story, going over some of the more interesting characters, but that’s not really the way I should tell this story. The way I need to tell this story is by telling you how I came to read these two comics.

Let’ go way back to the Spring of 2005, and talk about something that has nothing to do with webcomics for a moment: Bob Dylan.

My high school musical tastes were pretty much dominated by Billy Joel, the Beatles, and a smattering of Simon and Garfunkel. I wanted to expand my tastes, but I didn’t like listening to radio, so I went and bought CDs from artists I’d heard about and wanted to learn more. One day roaming through Best Buy attracted me to a boxed set of Dylan albums: Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, and Time out of Mind.

Now, the way I liked to listen to music was to learn the whole album. I did this by listening to it, almost to the exclusion of all other music, for at least a few days at a time, and sometimes up to a month. And so I started, one by one, with these three discs. For two weeks, Blonde on Blonde was in the CD player of my car, and was playing whenever I drove.

Until, of course, the accident.

The details of my car accident aren’t too important, but what is important is that A) I didn’t get Blonde on Blonde out of the player, B) that I got the day off of work, and C) I really needed something to lift my spirits, because car accidents ain’t fun.

An online buddy of mine (incidentally, a guy from the Angel Moxie forums) had suggested a comic that was just ending at the time called It’s Walky!, so with a lot of free time on my hands, I plopped down at my desk, put Blood on the Tracks into my computer, and spent a full weekend reading through those archives.

And that’s how I figured out that Blood on the Tracks, particularly in the later parts, is an incredibly moving soundtrack for this comic.